A summary of T. S. Eliot’s ‘brothel poem’ by Dr Oliver Tearle The figure of Sweeney features in several poems by T. S. Eliot: ‘Sweeney Erect’, ‘Sweeney among the Nightingales’, ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’ (where we find him in the bath in the final stanza), The Waste Land (where […]
In this week’s Dispatches from the Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle explores a modernist war poem by an overlooked writer As it’s Refugee Week, my thoughts have turned to poetry about refugees – such as Auden’s ‘Refugee Blues’ and the lines from the Elizabethan play Sir Thomas More (which may […]
A summary of a classic modernist poem by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ has been called, by the academic literary critic Christopher Ricks (one of the finest living critics and the co-editor of Eliot’s poetry), the best first poem in a first volume of poems: […]
Dr Oliver Tearle’s summary of Eliot’s classic poem ‘The Hollow Men’ is a poem of boundaries. Published in 1925, halfway through the modernist decade of the 1920s, it was T. S. Eliot’s one major poem between The Waste Land in 1922 and his conversion to Christianity in 1927.
A summary of an influential essay – analysed by Dr Oliver Tearle ‘Hamlet and his Problems’ is one of T. S. Eliot’s most important and influential essays. It was first published in 1919. In ‘Hamlet and his Problems’, Eliot makes the bold claim that Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, far from being […]